14. Healing from Gaslighting - Helping Your Child Feel Safe by Trusting Yourself First

One of the hardest things for single moms who have lived through narcissistic abuse is how to heal from gaslighting, to then help our children trust their own inner signals. Because kids don't learn emotional intuition from lectures, they learn it from us. From watching how we read situations, how we respond, how we recover when things go sideways. And if you grew up in chaos or manipulation or if you married into it, your inner signals were probably rewired, dismissed, or punished. Therefore, trusting yourself now feels confusing, or delayed, or unreliable.

This is the Transcript for Episode 14. 

You can rebuild that sense of inner safety

You can rebuild it. And when you do, your child becomes safer too. Now why does your child need your internal safety first? Well, kids are sensitive. Especially neurodivergent kids, PDA kids, anxious kids.They're always reading the emotional air in the room and scanning for people's emotions. It's not your words. It's not your rules. It's a nervous system that they're looking at.

And that can feel terrifying if you don't always trust your nervous system yourself. So here's the reframe,

"you don't need to be perfectly calm. You do need to be self-honest in real time and humble"

Something like, "okay, my body's overwhelmed right now, but you're not the problem." Or, "I need 30 seconds, then I can help you." Or, "I'm safe. You're safe. We can do this slowly." That's emotional intuition in action. When your child sees that, they copy it without even knowing.

Story time

The other day we were walking back from school, my son and I, and this lady on the sidewalk had two small dogs with her. As we got closer, they started getting completely out of control, barking and lunging at us. Of course, I had left my noise-canceling headphones at home. And of course, that was one of the rare times where my son was talking to me about school, which he really does. He rarely tells me about school. So I'm really wanting to listen. And these two dogs are just lunging and barking and growling at us. Okay, so I put my fingers in my ears to cover the rabid barking, and to be able to actually hear what did matter to me: my son talking to me. The woman's expression became absolutely hateful. Like, how dare I express that her dogs are absolutely unsufferable? And that look on her face, coupled with the overwhelming sound levels and the fact that I'm really trying to listen to my child, because this is a particularly rare moment when he wants to tell me about school, all of that made me extremely angry.

For the next five minutes, while we're walking home, I was completely unable to imprint with my son was saying. I knew I was missing out on an opportunity to finally hear about his day. That made me sad. It was just a mess overall. And I'm noticing as I'm over here, struggling with the sounds and the fact that I just got really triggered, trying to manage my big emotions, I'm noticing that my son is starting to talk louder and louder, and that he's starting to stim. He had picked up on all my emotions and I can see that clear as day.

That made me even more upset because he doesn't need that burden. He doesn't need the negativity. So I'm starting to feel guilty on top of everything else. It's just a mess. So we get home and I go to my room (It's what I do when I detect anger, within a bunch of emotions that I'm feeling. If I know there's anger in there, I'll go to my room and I'll punch the pillows as hard as I can until I'm physically tired. That usually takes 20 seconds as I'm not in the best shape of my life :) but I let it out. I really believe in letting anger out. It's also something that I'm teaching him.)

So I go to my room, I do that, and then I follow up with quick grounding techniques, the ones I've explained in other episodes, and then I went to the room where my son had started playing and I reconnected with him. I explained to him that the dogs were just too much, that the lady was rude, that it made me angry, and that I was sorry I wasn't able to hear what he had to say, that what he had to say really mattered to me, and that I was now fully available to hear all the interesting things he wanted to share.

He, by then, had become completely calm. He wasn't dissociated, he was just calm, and he resumed telling me about his day. Unbelievable. The shift in him was striking. I swear to God, dealing with this kid, is like looking in a mirror.

Autistic mothers often deal with alexithymia, so we can have a hard time knowing and identifying an emotion that we're feeling, and if you experienced years of gaslighting on top of that - whether from your family of origin, your culture, or other sources - you may find it really challenging to listen to the signs within your body and fully acknoweledge and own an emotion. But the kids will show us before we know it, when something's going on. That's amazing.

Why does trauma make us second guess everything?

If you spent years or decades being told "you're too sensitive", "you're overreacting", "oh no, that never happened", "yeah, you're imagining things", or my personal favorite, "you should have known better", then your brain learned to doubt itself as a survival strategy. What I just described, there's a name for it, it's called gaslighting, and it's a way of making someone believe that their intuition is wrong, and that their memories are inaccurate. And so they lose that ability to trust their intuition, to trust their memories, to trust their perception of reality. Gaslighting is extremely destructive, but you can heal from gaslighting.

"If you've been told those things, if you've been gaslit for a long time, no, your intuition was not wrong. The environment wasn't safe"

And so today, in this current stage of your life, your signals can feel scrambled. You're asking yourself how to heal from gaslighting, all the while you feel danger when you're safe, or you feel numb when things are actually wrong, and none of this is your fault. It's a nervous system that can be healed slowly, gently, and especially through parenting; because you now have to model listening to your intuition, trusting your intuition, verbalizing what's going on.

Here's a simple technique to rebuild intuition

You ask yourself throughout the day, "what's my body trying to tell me right now?" Not "what should I feel", or "what would a good mom feel?", or "what would a normal person feel?" None of that. Just, "what's my body saying right now?" Maybe it's saying "this is too much noise", or "I need to walk slower". Or, "this argument, it's activating an old wound." Or, "my child is not attacking me or trying to control me the way controlling dynamics worked in my past. No, he's having a hard time, he's overwhelmed, he's needing structure".

Another thing my body might be saying is, "I really don't want to be in this conversation right now." That's something that I've been able to feel more and more as I'm learning to unmask as an autistic adult. And so you can narrate a tiny version of these out loud to your child. What it does is that it shows them emotional literacy in real time. So for example, "wow, that loud banging startled my body. I'm going to breathe once before we keep going." Or, "okay, my brain feels really fast today, so I'm going to move slower on purpose." Verbalizing this. This is co-regulation, intuition, and safety building, all at once. With a sprinkle of modeling how you listen to and trust your body and your senses.

So in the example I gave you earlier about the dogs, I wasn't fooling my autistic child between the time I got angry and the time I was able to regulate at home. He was 100% aware that I was dysregulated and it was impacting him. I saw it on the street. I saw him talking louder and louder, and starting to stim. He was starting to need to regulate his nervous system.

The minute I had taken care of myself and then verbalized what had happened, how I had felt, and how I was feeling now, his demeanor completely shifted. And sometimes when I'm honest with him about something I'm feeling, I'll even get a pat on my cheek - with his face showing genuine support and love... He's learned that he can also help others through their stuff. And that's a lovely foundation for his future.

I'm not parentifying him. Parentification as a survivor of narcissistic abuse and trauma in general is something we have to be mindful of. We want to stay clear of parentification and I'll make sure to push out an episode about this later on. So he's not responsible for my emotions in any way. It's quite the opposite. He has the freedom to observe, listen, analyze, and then respond with compassion. This builds connection without shame. And so it models true emotional intelligence.

There's a beautiful line I love from the Virgin Mary's stories. It's a lot classier than the example I just gave, but yeah, I'm far from being like Mary. It's the idea that she pondered things in her heart. We hear that a lot throughout the Bible. We don't hear Mary speak so much. She's rarely speaking. But we do hear how she pondered things in her heart, not reacted. She wasn't ever trying to take control of the situation, or to force calm - even at the wedding in Cana. She surrendered to Jesus' wisdom and leadership, and she held her inner signals with curiosity, not fear. Maybe if I try to put myself in her shoes on those times in the Gospel, that's the energy I try to bring into my own parenting.

Sure, sometimes it looks intense, like in the example I shared, and that's okay. I'm not looking for perfection. I'm just listening in, with compassion for myself.

What does this look like on hard days, when you're tired?

You're overwhelmed, you're triggered, stimmed out. That is something I talk about in Episode 7. You're going to miss cues. You're going to overreact. You're going to shut down. You're going to guess wrong. You're going to doubt yourself. You're going to feel too much.

The only thing this means, is that you're very human. And every time you repair, every time you say, "I'm sorry baby. This is what just happened, let's try again", your child learns something incredibly powerful that maybe you didn't get: your ASD child learns that love doesn't disappear during stress. With repair, that love becomes soft, real, and safe.

You don't need perfect intuition, especially if it's been wrecked by years of gaslighting in an abusive relationship, and/or if you suffer from alexithymia as an ASD woman. You don't need perfect parenting. You don't need perfect calm. Your child just needs you honest, humble, present, repairing when needed. Learn your signals one day at a time.

You're rebuilding or building something no one taught you how to do (see Episode 12 for Cycle-Breaking Parenting). And you're doing it beautifully, one day at a time.

The content of this blog and podcast is for general information and inspiration only. It reflects lived experience and summaries of publicly available research. It is not medical, mental‑health, legal, or professional advice, and it isn’t a substitute for advice tailored to your situation. Please seek support from a qualified professional who understands your needs. If you or someone you’re caring for is at risk of harm, please contact local emergency services or a trusted crisis service in your area.